Heavier and healthier: end the obesity panic

Did you notice recent media coverage of the latest Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW) report on the health of Australians?

In some respects the document was not particularly noteworthy. It said the same thing that previous reports have been saying for a number of years now.

Australian life expectancy, for men and women, continues to go up and the incidence of common causes of death like heart disease and stroke continues to go down. These statistics are part of an ongoing trend that has been underway for decades in most Western countries.

The authors of the report were clear: Australians not only live longer lives than the past, they also live healthier for longer. Good news, right?

Actually, this is good news for everyone except for a group of health experts who have spent the last decade telling Australians what a fat and unhealthy lot we are.

The obesity lobby has good reason to be worried. The avalanche of chronic disease and sharp decline in life expectancy that they predicted have not materialised.

Their problem, of course, is of the ‘boy who cried wolf’ kind: who will listen to them now?

It is true enough that rates of overweight and obesity amongst Australians are considerably higher than they were in the 1970s.

However, when we hear that about 60 per cent of adult Australians are overweight or obese, what does this mean?

For one thing, the majority of this 60 per cent are only overweight, not obese, and overweight people are only a small amount above what experts call their ‘ideal weight’.

People who study body weight know that, in reality, the concept of ‘ideal weight’ is at best purely theoretical. Nobody actually knows what a person’s real ideal weight is and being a little above your theoretical ideal is not actually very significant for your health.

In fact, being technically overweight is no better a predictor of life expectancy than your height or hair colour and a steady stream of recent research articles shows that overweight people have the same health prospects as so-called ‘normal weight’ people.

So this is part of the explanation why we are getting heavier and healthier; most of the hundreds of thousands of Australians who technically fall into the overweight category are perfectly healthy.

Another reason is that, contrary to the doom and gloom coming from obesity experts, overweight and obesity rates have not changed that much in the last 10 to 15 years.

Of course, this is partly a matter of which research paper you read but the short version is that Australian body weights went up quite quickly before 1995 but not nearly as much in the 15 years or so since.

For example, despite almost daily warnings about ‘exploding’ childhood obesity, AIHW data show that overweight and obesity amongst Australian girls has changed very little in more than a decade. In fact, they report that 5.8 per cent of girls were obese in 2008, exactly the same percentage recorded in 1995.

And while overweight and obesity amongst boys rose by about 10 per cent in the 10 years from 1985 to 1995 (10.7 per cent to 20.5 per cent), it appears to have increased by about half that much in the 15 years since.

In a recent review of all published data, a group of researchers have concluded that Australian childhood overweight and obesity began to level off in the late 1990s. While sharp increases in the 1980s and 1990s are undeniable, this trend has not been sustained since.

This is in direct contrast to the statements of obesity experts who regularly claim that Australian childhood overweight and obesity statistics are galloping out of control. These statements are plainly mistaken.

For adults, AIHW previously reported that adult male overweight and obesity was 67 per cent in 2000. Their most recent statement on the health of Australians says that in 2008 the percentage was again 67 per cent. For women, with a little rounding of the decimal points, the situation is essentially the same.

My research shows that this is also a worldwide trend. Overweight and obesity rates in Western countries began to flatten and, in some cases, decline around the year 2000.

It is ironic, I think, to know that 10 years ago, just as the obesity epidemic was first being announced to the world, it had already begun to die.

But don’t expect many obesity experts to acknowledge this any time soon. Sometimes good news is simply too inconvenient to be made public.

There can be no doubt that there is a little too much body fat around than is optimal for our health. Fatness is now one of the many middle-of-the road public health issues that we face. It should be treated with the middle-of-the-road seriousness that it deserves.

We should also do what we can to help people with very high levels of body fat if they want to be helped and support health professionals who work with them.

However, with hindsight it is now clear that much too much has been made of obesity. Obesity is neither an epidemic nor a crisis.

Unfortunately, using the language of apocalypse has served only to guarantee that health resources would be sprayed indiscriminately at the problem. This is regrettable.

But the issue is not only one of waste. The rhetoric of crisis also makes it less likely that resources will go to the places they are most needed and were the most good can be done.

True, we do not live in perfect societies when it comes to health, but 100 years ago few could have imagined the improvements that would take place in the 20th century.

I sometimes wonder how healthy and how thin we would need to be in order to satisfy obesity experts. There is much to celebrate about health in Australia, and yet there is little sign that the most recent round of good health news will divert them from their war on our waist-lines.

Michael Gard is an Associate Professor in Charles Sturt University’s Faculty of Education. He teaches and writes about dance, sport and the science of human health.